RadWaste Monitor Vol. 10 No. 7
Visit Archives | Return to Issue
PDF
RadWaste & Materials Monitor
Article 7 of 9
February 17, 2017

Sellafield Sludge Goes Into Storage

By Chris Schneidmiller

The United Kingdom’s Sellafield site has started placing sludge from one of its two legacy fuel storage ponds into an interim holding site, the nuclear facility’s operator said Tuesday.

Sellafield Ltd. in mid-December transported the initial batch of sludge from the Pile Fuel Storage Pond to the Cumbria nuclear site’s waste encapsulation plant (WEP). The material there is mixed with cement in a process called grouting. A cement cap is then placed on the container, followed by a lid, and the drum is transported to an interim storage facility.

The waste encapsulation plant as of Wednesday had received 16 barrels and processed 14, according to Sellafield spokeswoman Ruth Hutchison. “We are currently going through an active commissioning phase, once this is completed we will be receiving 3 drums per week up until 2018 … then increase to 5 drums per week. This will remove all bulk sludge from PFSP by 2022/23,” she said by email.

The pond is believed to hold roughly 350 cubic meters of sludge. The drums ultimately will be placed in a national geologic repository for nuclear waste, which remains in the planning stages without a selected location.

The 100-meter-long Pile Fuel Storage Pond operated for 65 years, initially used for storage of nuclear fuel employed in production of nuclear weapons. The sludge formed in the pond by the mixture of deteriorating nuclear fuel, algae, and debris.

The sludge removal project is expected to cost about 100 million pounds ($124 million), which Hutchison said would cover the retrieval operations and two sludge processing facilities – the Local Sludge Treatment Plant and the Drum Filling Plant. The waste encapsulation plant was constructed in the 1980s.

“Having considered all options and what would be the best value to the tax payer, we didn’t build a special sludge new encapsulation plant, we are instead using an existing encapsulation plant that stores other types of waste and is fit for purpose,” Hutchison stated. “[T]his approach has saved the UK taxpayer tens of millions [of] pounds.”

The project also started a decade earlier than anticipated.

Removal of sludge from both the Pile Fuel Storage Pond and the younger First Generation Magnox Storage Pond (which holds about 1,500 cubic meters of sludge) is expected to be completed by 2022. The work is part of the larger, decades-long decommissioning of both ponds, in which equipment and all radioactive materials must be removed, water drained, and the structures demolished. That, in turn, is one key segment of the anticipated 100-year, £70 billion ($87 billion) cleanup of the entirety of Sellafield, the largest nuclear site in Europe.

Sellafield Ltd. in April 2016 became a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.K.’s public, nondepartmental Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. It was previously owned by Nuclear Management Partners, a partnership of AECOM, AREVA, and Amec Foster Wheeler.

Dounreay Used Fuel Pond

Meanwhile, the company charged with cleanup of the Dounreay site, a onetime fast-reactor research and development facility in Scotland, said Thursday it had extracted an initial concrete block from a cooling pond that is being prepared for demolition.

The pond was previously used for storage of spent fuel from the site’s fast reactor, according to a press release from Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd.

In total, roughly 180 concrete blocks, each weighing 1 metric ton, will be taken out of Dounreay’s two cooling ponds for disposal. All sludge, water, and redundant equipment has already been extracted from the ponds.

Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd. is owned by the Cavendish Dounreay Partnership, a venture of Cavendish Nuclear, CH2M, and AECOM.

Comments are closed.

Partner Content
Social Feed

NEW: Via public records request, I’ve been able to confirm reporting today that a warrant has been issued for DOE deputy asst. secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition Sam Brinton for another luggage theft, this time at Las Vegas’s Harry Reid airport. (cc: @EMPublications)

Load More